Backblaze is back with a new version of their Storage Pod. The major change is that they got rid of their port multiplier backplanes, and instead are going with drives directly attached to two expensive 40-port SATA cards.

The port multipliers have always been a negative aspect of their build to me, as I can see them causing problems, slowing down performance, and being difficult to integrate into a standard PC case. Their replacement is two $700 40-port SATA cards. The downside to these is price, and while I’d love to have one of these cards in my 20-drive file server, it’s out of my budget.

For the first time since the original Storage Pod, Backblaze is announcing a completely redesigned approach with the introduction of the first “direct wire” Storage Pod. This new Storage Pod performs four times faster, is simpler to assemble, and delivers our lowest cost per gigabyte of data storage yet. And, once again, it’s open source.